Saturday, March 28, 2015

Who the heck is Chris Kankelfritz?

For the last year Joanie has been working on her family tree
through Ancestry.com.Her drive to find
her paternal grandfather has taken hours, nay, days or even weeks of searching
on the computer.Indeed our trip to Kissimmee
was to search local records and find where her grandfather was buried.

We made some calls and visited a funeral home and found Michael John's grave.

The dead ends and wrong turns of doing these searches is
frustrating, to say the least.Joanie
finally broke down and paid for her grandfather’s official death certificate from
the state of Florida which has opened the flood gates of finding relatives and
brought some relief to the frustration. Many of the relatives we are now
finding, we knew about already but who the heck is Chris Kankelfritz?In Ancestry.com when you make a connection to
a relative, anybody else who has made a connection suddenly are displayed.Because we learned about dead ends and wrong
turns, we know that many connections may have been made in error by other
searchers on Ancestry.com.You have to
spend more time on Ancestry.com to clean the leaves out of your tree that blew
in and don’t belong there.

I’m starting to think Ancestry.com has a racket going on
here.

I have also learned that US census takers were not very
tenacious for ascertaining accurate records; that people who gave the census
workers the information made stuff up and that the givers and takers create
dead ends by not spelling very well.

For example, Joanie has been searching for her grandfather
Michael John Rogers.There were times it
was spelled ROGERS or RODGERS and Michael John seemed to be OK with
either.We ran across some information
that Irish members of the Church of Rome (Catholics) preferred ROGERS while Irish
Orangemen (Protestants) preferred the spelling RODGERS.We are still not too sure of this. If you know
anything about the history of Ireland you know that the steamy emotions leading
up to the Irish fight for independence continue to this day especially in
Northern Ireland.

Census information, draft records and military records, and
all kinds of public records allow us to start to put a life story together.

Joanie found records that her grandfather worked for Tide Water Oil Company, Bayonne, NJ in the 1920's. He worked and retired from the oil company as a locomotive engineer that the company used in their large refinery. It was only a couple miles of track but still one cool job!

The next time we get together with family, we will have some
interesting stuff to chew.